Yesterday, my husband said there was a power surge in our condo.

Our Dell XPS (2 years old) now has the blue screen of death.

I ran one ("ctrl + I" in startup screen) diagnostic and I got these codes: -STOP: OX0000007B (OXF78AEA98, OXC0000034, OX00000000, OX00000000).

The PC is really dead. I also have a Norton Ghost CD that came with the PC and I rebooted with it and it told me to do a "chkdsk /f" but I don't know how to do that without being able to boot up.

Anyone have any ideas for me please?!?!?

it ask you to do a disk check in command line. by any path, you can get into a DOS environment with that CD ?

Is your computer bootable? Please, describe your situation little bit better.

Thanks for your time and thoughts!

I cannot get to a screen to key in anything. I only see the actual blue screen of death for a millisecond as it cycles through screens. My computer keeps cycling from the windows screen to the boot screen, to the screen where it asks if you want to start in different modes (I've tried them all). Cycling, cycling, cycling...Arrrggg. I have the disks I used to update the PC to Vista and I've tried booting with both of them, but neither of them seem to make any difference. I don't know how to tell my PC to boot from a particular drive. Is that what I need to do?

Thanks.

Oh, and by the way the Norton Ghost CD I have is for the original OS which was XP. Oh why did I update??

Do you have Windows XP CD?

Yes, I have the XP CD, but I've installed Vista so I thought that would not work anymore.

Are those legal Vista Upgrade DVDs?
If so, they should be bootable.
Enter the BIOS, and make sure, the boot order lists CD\DVD drive first, before hard drive.

Yes, Dell sent me the Vista CDs. But I believe the CDs contacted Dell (or whoever) over the Internet for the Vista files, so there was not much on the CDs to help me because I tried booting from both of them.

I'll end this topic now...I had a professional come by and he removed Vista and the Raid Array (useless) from my PC (everything was corrupt). I'm back to XP now and have lost about 1-1/2 years worth of pictures, but I'm back up with two usable hard drives.

I'll not go back to Vista on this PC.

Thank you for your time and energy!!!
Have a happy and stable 2009!

Let me guess, it was a Dell XPS with a RAID 0 array....I HATE Dell for this. If so, this is the second one in the past few weeks I have seen fail. They don't tell people it is MUCH MUCH MUCH more unstable than a single HD setup. If one HD fails ALL data is lost period.

This wasn't Vista's fault but instead Dell's fault.

Yes, it is a Dell XPS and it used to have the RAID array.
But one of hard drives in the array failed almost 1 year ago and did not cause my computer to fail.
We looked into purchasing a new one hard drive--over $300!!
The tech that visited and fixed my PC told us that both hard drives are fine, it was the RAID (software) that failed.
I really, really dislike Dell too.